How to delete shadow copies on windows vista or Windows 7

With windows vista and 7, Microsoft added this new feature of shadow copies which creates shadow copies of the files which were changed and allow you to restore previous versions of files. If you haven't heard of it you are not alone. Others who noticed that a lot of the disk space is missing (that happened to me my data was approx 60GB and i was missing 25GB of my disk space) Here is the answer - Windows shadow copies is eating it up. This posts shows how to enable shadow copies and how to delete them. Enjoy !!!


How to enable the shadow copies
1. Right click on my computer  and click properties
2. Go to system protection tab and select the drive you want to enable the shadow copy on.
3. click the configure button and change the setting for the disk space to be used. (I would say 15GB is good enough)

you can also turn it off by selecting the 'turn off system protection button'

Deleting shadow copies is a nice way to free up disk space as well because there are a lot of unnecessary shadow copies that take up a lot of disk space. To delete shadow copies

1. Run command prompt as administrator
2. type vssadmin. A list of commands will be displayed

 3. To delete oldest shadow copies type
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /oldest /quiet                  
(the quiet options omit the unnecessary questions as "Are you sure you want to delete the shadow copy")
(i typed drive c: but you can type whatever drive it is)
4. To delete all shadow copies type
vssadmin delete shadows /for=c: /all
 but make sure after deleting all the shadow copies you create at least one restore point because deleting shadow copies also deletes all the restore points.
5. And we are done, now if you check your disk space, you will find it increased by a 10 GB at the minimum. when i did this first time, I freed about 25GB of free space. (My shadow copy disk size was 40GB, Imagine how much i was losing on my disk space) :)